The New Tsar (78 page)

Yanukovich did little to defuse the protests at first, content to wait them out with the onset of winter. Early in December, as the protests intensified, he flew to China, touting trade deals he hoped would mollify the anger over rejecting an economic partnership with the Europeans. He stopped in Sochi to meet Putin on the way back, and there he secured a secret deal that would not be announced until December 17, when they again appeared together in the Kremlin. Putin announced that Russia would give Ukraine a cash infusion worth $15 billion by tapping Russia’s National Wealth Fund to purchase Ukrainian bonds. Gazprom would slash the price of natural gas from $400 per cubic meter to $268.
Putin emphasized, disingenuously, that he had not insisted that Ukraine join the Eurasian Union as a condition, though many suspected he and Yanukovych had agreed that this would happen at a later date, once the popular anger had subsided. Putin then made special note of his plans to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Sevastopol, the port city in Crimea, from the Nazis in 1944. Those celebrations would ultimately take place on May 9, 2014, though not in circumstances that anyone anticipated that wintry day in Moscow. Putin, once again, seemed to have outmaneuvered his rivals, securing a diplomatic victory over the Europeans.

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A
head of the Olympics, Putin sought to be magnanimous at home. After a year of harsh crackdowns and repressive new laws, the Kremlin signaled a thaw in the summer of 2013. In July, the court in Kirov had convicted Navalny of the embezzlement charges but then after a confusing night that included protests and frantic consultations between the Kremlin and the court, he was freed with only a suspended sentence. The Kremlin then allowed Navalny to campaign—at first furtively, then openly—as a candidate in Moscow’s mayoral election in August against the incumbent, Sergei Sobyanin. It was the first campaign for the position since Putin had abolished elections for regional leaders after Beslan in 2004. Sobyanin, after Yuri Luzhkov’s dismissal in 2010, hoped to establish his own political legitimacy and resigned early in order to win the office in what he vowed would be a free and fair election. Despite the by now familiar harassment of challengers and the use of government resources on behalf of the incumbent, the election that unfolded was certainly fairer than most had been in Russia for more than a decade, as even Putin’s critics pointed out. Navalny modeled his campaign on one he had watched on the American television series
The Wire
, stumping for votes in speeches in public places around the city in a way that few candidates ever had in Russia.

Two years of diminishing public protests had done nothing to weaken Putin’s grip on power. Now he seemed confident enough to relax some of the pressure he had exerted to suffocate the opposition. When the ballots in the mayor’s race were counted, Sobyanin won, but Navalny drew 27 percent of the vote, a respectable showing that was far higher than polls had predicted. He thus established himself as the country’s most prominent opposition leader—and yet not one who posed a formidable or imminent threat to Putin’s political control.

The thaw continued in December, when at Putin’s instigation the Duma adopted a law to grant amnesty to thousands of prisoners. Many of them had been convicted for economic “crimes” imposed to strip them of property or businesses, but the list of those eligible for amnesty included more prominent political prisoners, as well. The two members of Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, walked free a few months before their sentences ended, so did a few of those charged in the Bolotnaya Square protests. The courts then amnestied thirty Greenpeace International activists who had been arrested in September 2013 after their ship,
Arctic Sunrise
, mounted a high-seas protest against Russia’s first offshore oil rig in the Kara Sea.

The biggest surprise of all, however, was the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in October. He marked his tenth year in prison, and Russian prosecutors had recently announced that they were pursuing yet another criminal case against him, suggesting he might never be freed. And yet two years of secret negotiations brokered by Germany cleared a path to freedom. As part of the deal, Khodorkovsky appealed to Putin in two letters that he had written in November. They have never been made public. Although Putin had at first demanded that Khodorkovsky acknowledge his guilt, he agreed to accept his plea for clemency on humanitarian grounds, citing his mother’s declining health. “He has already spent more than ten years in confinement—this is a serious punishment,” Putin said at his annual press conference in December. The broader amnesty appeared now, in hindsight, to have been engineered to accomplish the release of the man whose arrest in 2003 had signaled a dark turn in the country’s modern history.

A few hours after Putin spoke in Moscow, Khodorkovsky was awoken at two o’clock in the morning in Karelia, where he had spent the last years of his detention. He was put on a plane and flown first to Petersburg and then to Berlin, another exile from the new Russia. The next day he appeared at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, devoted to the dissident heroes of the Cold War and the victims of the divisions represented by the Berlin Wall. Grayer, his hair shorn, Khodorkovsky looked like someone who had walked “in from the cold and dark into a brightly lit and overheated room,” a journalist who was there, Arkady Ostrovsky, wrote. Khodorkovsky, who had spent so much of his time in prison reading and writing, sounded neither broken nor bitter.
²³
“In all these years, all the decisions about me were taken by one man: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. So today it is hard to say I am grateful. I have thought
quite a bit about what words would express what I think. I am happy at his decision—I think that’s it.” As a condition of his release, he had agreed not to become involved in politics for a year, though he vowed to be active in forging a civil society in Russia—from afar. “The Russian problem is not just the president as a person,” he said. “The problem is that our citizens in the large majority don’t understand that they have to be responsible for their own fate. They are so happy to delegate it to, say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and then they will entrust it to somebody else, and I think that for such a big country as Russia this is the path to a dead end.”

Khodorkovsky’s release was intended to look less like an expulsion of a dissident than an act of mercy, the benevolence of a tsar. Many, including Khodorkovsky and the women of Pussy Riot, saw the amnesties as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to take some of the edge off growing international criticism before the Olympics in Sochi, now less than two months away. Putin’s pressure on Ukraine, the strengthening of laws against political opponents, the homophobic legislation and statements of some lawmakers and officials, the scandalously expensive preparations of the venues in Sochi, and the punitive anti-terrorist operations in the Caucasus leading up to it—all had come under withering attack. World leaders, including Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and David Cameron, made it clear they would not be attending the games, lest their attendance be seen as endorsing Putin’s rule. Polishing Russia’s image was certainly part of the motive behind Putin’s actions. They also demonstrated his singular power to bend branches of power to his will. Even other countries would succumb. Putin granted the amnesties the way he granted the contracts to build Sochi to the tycoons he trusted, the way he could, without debate, spend $15 billion of the nation’s rainy day fund to keep Yanukovych’s government under Moscow’s sway. Khodorkovsky was right. Putin did what he did, on his own, because the people had “entrusted” him to rule, to be the ultimate leader, the tsar of a simulated democracy. There was no one now—from the ordinary Russian to the apparatchiks who were complicit in the political and economic system he had built—who would, or could, take the responsibility to change things.

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O
n the night of February 7, 2014, Putin, in one short sentence prescribed by the Olympic Charter, opened the Winter Games in Sochi. Not everything had been completed in time, despite a breakneck effort
that continued even after the sporting events began: the unfinished sidewalks were hastily covered; fields of construction debris were hidden behind crisp blue billboards. The failure to complete many hotels, especially those where foreign journalists stayed, threatened to turn the event into a public relations debacle. A campaign to round up stray dogs, presumably to euthanize them, became the most prominent meme of the pre-opening coverage in the media, after the colossal expense of rebuilding Sochi and the threat of terrorism, punctuated at the end of December by two suicide bombings in Volgograd that killed thirty-four people. There was an element of schadenfreude in some of the coverage of Russia’s bloated and brutal preparations; there was also genuine international concern over Russia’s regressive new laws—especially those regarding blasphemy and “homosexual propaganda”—and the smothering of protests that continued up to and through the opening ceremony.

Two days before the games commenced, more than two hundred writers from thirty countries published an open letter in
The Guardian
calling for the repeal of laws stifling free expression that had been passed since Putin returned to the presidency. Four winners of the Nobel Prize—Günter Grass, Wole Soyinka, Elfriede Jelinek, and Orhan Pamuk—were among the signatories. Publicly, Putin feigned indifference to the criticism, small and large, but it was said to have infuriated him. In an interview in
Kommersant
Dmitri Peskov, his spokesman, dismissed the complaints of corruption and waste as exaggerations.
²⁴
Come to Sochi, he said, and look at what had been built. It was proof enough that “at the very least, not all the money was stolen.” He recounted a conversation with “a very wise person,” clearly meaning Putin.

“This wise person said, ‘Do you know when everyone will love us and cease to criticize us, and so on, including criticizing us for no reason?’

“And I asked, ‘When?’

“And he said, ‘When we dissolve our army, when we concede all our natural resources to them as a concession, and when we sell all of our land to Western investors—that’s when they will cease to criticize us.’ ”

In fact, the criticism waned once the games began. The opening ceremony was a lavish, dazzling expression of Putin’s Russian ideal, choreographed by the head of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst, who also directed the annual Victory Day parades on Red Square and Putin’s annual press conferences. The spectacle, called “Dreams of Russia,” and lasting nearly three hours, began with a young girl named Lyubov, or
Love, reciting the Cyrillic alphabet. With each letter came a projection representing famous artists, inventors, and places:
Б
for Baikal,
С
for Sputnik,
Π
for the Periodic Table of Mendeleyev, and so on. Some were émigrés whose works had once been considered deviant or traitorous, including Chagall, Kandinsky, and Nabokov, but who were now reinstalled in the pantheon of a glorious Russian history. Lyubov was then swept through the country’s vast history and geography, from the empire of Peter the Great (the letter
И
for
Imperiya
) to
War and Peace
, represented by a dazzling ballet, from the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral to a luminescent troika that Gogol made a metaphor for Russia in
Dead Souls:
“Russia, whither are you rushing? Answer! It gives no answer.” The ceremony did not ignore the Bolsheviks, the Terror, or the Gulag completely, but it did not dwell on them. The ceremony was a manifestation of the “national idea” at the center of Putin’s political construct, one that somehow adapted the best of the country’s turbulent past and turned the arc of history into something people could be proud of, not ashamed. The only glitch in the ceremony came when five illuminated snowflakes unfolded into the rings of the Olympic symbol. One flake failed, but adroit television producers swiftly replaced the image with one from a rehearsal; no one watching on Russian television knew what had happened. The final journey of the Olympic torch, which in keeping with the superlative narrative of these games had traversed the country, from the bottom of Lake Baikal to outer space, included some of Russia’s famous Olympians. The most noted of them was the gold medal winner from Athens in 2004, Alina Kabayeva.

The Olympics served the political purpose Putin intended. Even Aleksei Navalny, whose anti-corruption organization had published an interactive website on the titanic waste involved, found himself moved by the opening ceremony. “It’s so sweet, and so uniting.” As the attention turned to the sports, as Putin and his aides had always insisted it should, the Olympics even seemed to temper some of the harshest criticism of him and his rule. Putin himself rushed from event to event, reveling in the sports and the attention. He posed for photo ops with the athletes, drank beer at the Dutch house with King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, and even paid a visit to Team USA, ostentatiously making the point that despite his political differences with the United States, he welcomed their participation—and that he was a bigger man than Obama, who had declined to attend. He had achieved his dream: Russia
was at the global center of gravity, a rich, indispensable, united nation playing host to the world. Russia, in his mind, had achieved the glory, the respect, that the Soviet Union had had when he was a boy, when Gagarin was in space, when the Red Army was formidable and feared.

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A
nd yet, beneath the spectacle and the sports, there was an undercurrent of unease and fear. The national unity on display in Sochi, however genuine, did nothing to keep the steady, firm hand of the state from throttling any sign of dissent. The protests in Ukraine, which had not dissipated over the winter, reverberated in Moscow like a distant earthquake, faintly but ominously shaking the ground. In the weeks before the games, Putin moved preemptively to quarantine any new outbreak of the protest contagion inside Russia. In December he decreed a makeover of RIA Novosti, the state news organization that under Medvedev had earned respect for balance and a diversity of points of view. In January, a liberal television station called Dozhd, or Rain, was dropped by the nation’s cable providers after asking in an online poll whether more lives might have been saved in Leningrad if the Red Army had surrendered the city and retreated instead of enduring 872 days of siege at the cost of one million dead. Having reconstructed Putin’s Olympian ideal of Russia’s history, the Kremlin seemed determined to silence anyone who might contradict it.